FOREWORD – here’s another from the archives. In an age when all we seem to hear about is child abuse, a tale of childhood innocence from many years ago.
The Cess Pit
I’ve been a member of Bolton Villas Cricket Club for over forty years now and yet my earliest memories are of an outdoor cesspit which was the club’s only male toilet.
You had to enter with fingers pinching your nose and on hot summer days you had as good a chance of contracting malaria as anywhere else on the planet; the seductive, aromatic smells of linseed oil and polished leather would come much later.
Our “bogs” were a rusting lean-to; a three-sided wall of block backed onto the main wooden hut. In a way they sort of propped the old ramshackle hut up at the back, preventing it from total collapse.
As kids we stood and took aim against the black painted front wall, standing well back and aiming as high as we could so not to splatter our new Dunlop Greenflash pumps. You knew you were a man when you could finally clear the wall and hit the adjoining garden’s greenhouse.
It had a corrugated iron roof where a peaceful piss could be disrupted by a brick thrown on top, causing you to literally “brick yourself” and stain your shorts, having to stay in there whilst you dried, risking death by any number of airborne diseases.
The “trap” was only ever used in extreme circumstances and it was always safer to hover, painful as it was on the thighs. Many a player simply vanished across the field, clutching the day’s newspaper and disappearing into the long grass.
It was here that I had an early night of pre-pubescent enlightenment, a formative experience that introduced me to the female form outside of my mum’s sixteen inch rented Rediffusion.
Here my real journey to manhood began in a darkened piss-hole on a cold winter’s night as several young males gathered to watch a beautiful young woman display her wares oblivious to our bulging eyes.
Long before Freeview and a major improvement on the Grattan catalogue, this was undoubtedly the best night of my life aged eleven.
At this tender age the female form had remained a mystery save for the furtive peaks at the BBC 2 French movie each Friday night and a well-worn copy of Penthouse purchased as a syndicated effort for sixty pence and hidden under my mattress.
My mum knew better than to risk moving my mattress without a full protective rubber suit.
Each Friday night I waited for her to nod off in her armchair so I could silently flick over to the continental fare, trying not to wake her as I pushed the stiff button on the set.
So when I heard rumours from the older lads at the club about a girl who could be described as an exhibitionist, once I had looked up the meaning of the word I wanted “in”. This seemed much better than sitting on a sofa with a cushion on my lap listening to my mum snoring.
For weeks, my mate Duck and I begged the older lads to take us behind the hut to the toilets. This was, after all, the age of innocence when all we thought of Jimmy Savile was that he looked a silly old twat in a shell suit.
Rumour Has It
The older guys had us salivating at stories of her wild and uninhibited behaviour all available from our vantage point in the cesspit. She seemed carefree, oblivious and apparently had great “norks”.
Who after all would guess that a dozen or so young lads would stakeout the local cesspit and survive to tell the tale; unless my mum found out which would be an instant battering and a far worse death than malaria.
Finally and without hesitation we accepted the invitation from the older lads to meet them around the back of the toilets late one night and promised not to tell our mums and dads; as I said the age of innocence.
So there I was in a filthy toilet with a bunch of older lads. Worse still, some of the them were public school boys. Was I about to become part of some weird initiation ceremony?
The older lads told us not to touch the walls as that was how they had caught something called “the clap”.
A good viewing point in the bunker-like structure was not going to be easy to find as the bigger lads dwarfed us. You also had to be careful not to get too close to the stained block wall and its awful smell.
Darkness, Silence and Anticipation
It was dark and all I wanted to do was holler with excitement like a mad wolf as the anticipation built up. The older lads intimated that if I did they would make me holler but from the piss-soaked cinders they would stuff down my throat.
They set the scene as we killed time awaiting signs of life in her bedroom with several sets of beady eyes staring out into the gloom. I felt a flickering of life in my Top Man polyester leopard skins and doubted if I could contain myself.
Suddenly on came the bedroom light and I shall never forget what happened next. There she was, standing at the window like the Pope in St Peters Square seemingly addressing her adorning fans, who were a group of lads squeezed into a cess-pit trying to not to make a squeak in the smelly darkness.
She was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous – well I was eleven – with arms outstretched as if waving to us in the darkness. Majestically she dropped her towel to reveal a magnificent pair of glistening, soapy beauties.
I could hardly contain myself any longer but fortunately a hand clasped across my mouth suppressing a yelp.
However, there was no stopping my forward lunge onto the backs of the bigger lads to get a better view, grabbing at hair and necks as if rucking for England against the French at Twickenham.
In triumph my arms shot aloft astride the bigger lads and crashed into the corrugated roof making such a clatter I thought I’d broken my hands.
Steam was pouring out of our vantage point so much so it must have looked like a giant kettle as hot teenage breath hit the cold night air.
And in a flash it was all over; off went the lights and Duck and I scampered off home feeling that we had finally become men albeit slightly seedy ones.
I think she got wise when we started queuing up mid-afternoon flogging binoculars; soon it came to an end. I heard she had a steady boyfriend so there I was back again on the sofa, glued to the sub-titles with stirrings under that cushion, my mum snoring for England.
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